Saddleback Caterpillar with Thumb

Saddleback Caterpillar: Look, No Touch!

Beautiful but deadly! Well, not deadly, but extremely uncomfortable. This saddleback caterpillar, Acharya stimuli,  is bristling with stinging hairs. Potent enough to cause nausea in addition to straightforward pain. Thumb for scale. I followed this specimen over several days as it worked on blackberry leaves. I was excited to find this; I have been looking for one for […]

Monarch on Joe Pye Wee

Hope for the Future

I have chosen a shot from the archives for this last post of the year. (Today’s One Picture a Day is posted elsewhere illustrating an eBay auction.) This was taken in the summer of 2012. The monarch butterflies were a routine sight that summer. This summer was another story; the monarchs were nowhere. I saw […]

Cabbage White Butterfly (Pieris rapae)

Cabbage…Yellow?

More butterflies in the golden light of fall afternoon. Today we have a Cabbage White Butterfly  (Pieris rapae)  nectaring on a comfrey flower (Symphytum × uplandicum, I presume.) The yellow appears on the underwing. Below is a capture that shows the tops of the wings with their familiar white with prominent black spots. Females have a second dark […]

Empty bug exoskeleton

Bug Suit

I predict a good year for stinkbugs. A casual survey revealed several bugs within my field of view on most of the bushes I looked at. Not all of them were brown marmorated stink bugs, the invasive alien that has been sweeping across the U.S. in recent years. However, many of them were. When I […]